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The orbital angular momentum is a fundamental degree of freedom of light wavefronts, currently exploited in applications where information capacity is a key requirement, such as optical communication, super-resolution imaging and high-dimensional quantum computing. However, generating orbital angular momentum beams requires spatio-temporally coherent light sources (lasers or supercontinuum sources), because incoherent light would smear out the doughnut features of orbital angular momentum beams, forming polychromatic or obscured orbital angular momentum beams instead. Here we show generation of coloured orbital angular momentum beams using incoherent white light. Spatio-temporal coherence is achieved by miniaturizing spiral phase plates and integrating them with structural colour filters, three-dimensionally printed at the nanoscale. Our scheme can in principle generate multiple helical eigenstates and combine colour information into orbital angular momentum beams independently. These three-dimensional optical elements encoded with colour and orbital angular momentum information substantially increase the number of combinations for optical anti-counterfeiting and photonic lock–key devices in a pairwise fashion.

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The code used for the photonic tally design and characterization is available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

The data that support the figures and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Light illuminationNagoya

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), Singapore, Singapore

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Key Lab of Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Information System, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, China

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Ren, H. et al. An achromatic metafiber for focusing and imaging across the entire telecommunication range. Nat. Commun. 13, 4183 (2022).

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Centre for Artificial-Intelligence Nanophotonics, School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

Fang, J. et al. Spin-dependent optical geometric transformation for cylindrical vector beam multiplexing communication. ACS Photon. 5, 3478–3484 (2018).

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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

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Nature Nanotechnology thanks Dong Jianji and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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J.K.W.Y. acknowledges funding support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore under its Competitive Research Programme award (NRF-CRP20-2017-0004) and NRF Investigatorship Award (NRF-NRFI06-2020-0005). C.-W.Q. acknowledges financial support from the NRF, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under the Competitive Research Program Award (NRF-CRP26-2021-0063). C.-W.Q. is also supported by a grant (A-0005947-16-00) from the Advanced Research and Technology Innovation Centre at the National University of Singapore. M.G. acknowledges the support from the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (grant no. 21DZ1100500) and the Shanghai Frontiers Science Center Program (2021–2025 no. 20).

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Hongtao Wang, J.K.W.Y. and C.-W.Q. conceived the idea of CVBs and a photonic tally pair. Hongtao Wang performed the design, numerical simulation, fabrication and characterization of the photonic tally pair with assistance from Hao Wang and drafted the paper. All the authors contributed to the data analysis and paper revision. J.K.W.Y. and C.-W.Q. supervised the whole project.

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